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Friday, September 28, 2012

Scene Stealer: Frida

I was transfixed the first time I saw Frida.Julie Taymor’s
colourful imagination and direction and her gift for creating daring and
artistic visuals made the biopic about famed Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, a
work of art in and of itself.There are
many memorable scenes in the film, but the scene that I recall being struck by
the most is one that features destruction and pain but is a thing of real
beauty.The way Taymor stages and
directs the scene makes the catastrophe more like a slow-moving, intense and
visually-stunning theatrical vignette.The
events that informed Frida's character and fed her art are shot in painstaking,
magical detail.

Young Frida is on a crowded city bus fighting with her
boyfriend over the writings of Hegel and Marx. She notices a young boy holding
a blue bird and a man carrying a toolbox containing a cone filled with gold leaf.“Is that gold, real gold?” Frida
asks.“It’s for the ceiling of the opera
house,” the man tells her, and pours some gold leaf into her hand.Frida’s face lights up as she looks at the
beautiful gold dust. Suddenly, the bus jerks and crashes into a
tram and Frida falls backwards sending the gold leaf flying into the air, coating her hair
and face in gold. She sees the
wall of a building on the street coming closer as the bus careens towards
it.The bus crashes into the wall. The action is shown in slow-mo, letting
you absorb every frightening second.The
young boy lets go of the blue bird in his hand and it flies into the air;
another rider's bunch of oranges falls to the buckling floorboards of the
bus; glass shatters; other riders fall to the floor and Frida is thrown forward, her
body pierced by a giant steel rod, her back horribly shattered. There she lies bloodied, broken and covered in gold.

The detail shown creates a truly arresting and surreal
scene.The presence of the blue bird and
the gold dust are remarkably poignant.It’s
an artistic rendering of a great catastrophe in Frida’s life, and it shows how
keenly aware she was, no matter where she was, of colour and beauty and the elements
of art.Taymor uses the blue bird and
the gold dust to subtly foreshadow the way in which Frida copes with
constant pain after the accident.She is
never to be pain-free again and she overcomes this through imagination, colour,
imagery and her art.

I'm a fan of the movie too and I think it is a visually stunning piece of work. That whole scene is like a beautifully choreographed piece of art and is so startling and effective. I think Salma Hayek really played the role of her career in this film.